Free Prequel Novella to the Griffin Coven Series.
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“Nonna wants you to put your paws in the dirt? Where? Why?”
“Colorado. And I don’t have a clue.”
Matt looked around Mateo’s office with its two walls of windows above Central Park. Lunch deliveries from two different restaurants sat on the table next to the nearest window because Mateo liked the flavor of soy sauce from one restaurant and the Boba tea from the other. A custom massage chair sat in the corner near a desk the size of a full bed, below three screens showing different news channels next to four different clocks on the wall.
“Can I ask if you’re going to do it?” Matt asked as he turned back to the man behind the hundred-thousand-dollar wood they pulled up from a shipwreck in the North Atlantic.
Mateo Amato dominated the space from a surprisingly battered office chair behind the desk. His Italian heritage was obvious in sun-kissed skin and night-black hair, and his wolf showed in the kind of muscles bodybuilders would envy, for all that he spent ten hours a day behind that desk.
“You can always ask,” Mateo said with a grim smile. His nose was just a little too long, his features too heavy to be model handsome, but he definitely had the intimidating thing down pat.
Matt frowned. He rarely looked at the dude. There were always a thousand things to fix or go over when he made it down to Midtown, and he was normally too busy to question what his adopted alpha was doing with his life.
“Are you going to answer this time?” Matt asked, and his wolf sat up within him, wondering why he was questioning the alpha.
Because he has gone stark raving insane, and I just want to contemplate whether it’s time to abandon ship.
It was a lie, and they both knew it. He would never abandon ship. Technically, Matt wasn’t part of the Amato pack. He wasn’t an Amato. He was pasty pale of uncertain ancestry with indifferent brown hair, a lone wolf who’d come to New York City from a tiny town in the Midwest after his pack had gone to war with another. At seventeen—legally a child by a matter of days—he’d just escaped the slaughter. He’d come looking for opportunity and anonymity, like any of the other 5000 people who moved to the city every day.
He’d found a web of magical creatures coexisting in a few square blocks and had walked all over the unwritten lines and nearly gotten himself killed. Again.
Mateo Amato had plucked him out of a dogfight and given him a home. His only explanation had been that the Matts of the world had to stick together.
A decade later, they were still sticking together. Matt had worked on making himself indispensable, first for sheer self-preservation and gratitude, and eventually for everything else. They shared no blood, but he was staring at his brother, wondering what had happened to the obscenely rich CEO and alpha werewolf of the most powerful pack in the city.
“Nonna thinks it will help,” Mateo said, chewing on his Boba.
Matt had never understood the obsession with slimy choking hazards in a perfectly good tea and sighed. Mateo had evoked the name of the one person more powerful than he was in New York, the tiny 90-year-old matriarch of the pack.
“Help with what?” Matt asked, though he was 98% sure he knew the answer. There was only one thing on Nonna’s mind: werewolf babies. She’d even gone after him, though if she thought a female shifter had any interest in the lone wolf errand boy of the Amato pack, she hadn’t lived his life for the last decade.
“You know.” Mateo sighed and stabbed his chopsticks vaguely northwest toward the apartment building he owned on the West Side, where Rosina Amato reigned supreme in the penthouse.
“Yeah, but how?” How would a trip to the backwoods get them babies? Presumably, there were fewer wolves out there.
“‘We hava neglected our rooots,’” Mateo said, sounding disturbingly like a 90-year-old Italian grandma. “I never shift. I need paws on the Earth. I don’t know. She got going in Italian.”
Which, technically, Mateo did speak. Hell, Matt could even follow most of what she said after a decade of harangues, but sometimes he swore she started speaking in tongues.
“So why not head back to the old country? What the hell is in Colorado?”
“Jacomo Mateo Amato came to this country to begin a new pack,” Mateo said through a mouthful of Lo Mein in the rhyming tones of a story often repeated. “He sought his fortune in the gold rush and proved that second best can win in the long run.”
Which meant the old wolf stuck a claim for a silver mine in the mountains of Colorado, made more money than most of the gold diggers, and lived happily ever after with that new pack. Until his grandson with an unspecified number of greats, Mateo’s father, took all that cash and got the hell out of Dodge. Or maybe he went straight to Dodge.
“Hey, Mateo, where is Dodge?”
Chopsticks paused halfway to mouth. “What?”
“You know the saying: get the hell out of Dodge? So where is Dodge?”
“Kansas.”
“It is not.”
“I never know what to say when people say that. Is too? Why would I have lied?”
Matt laughed. “It’s just surprise. I would never have guessed Kansas.”
“Dodge City, Kansas. Cattle town in the late 1800s.”
Matt didn’t know how close Kansas was to Colorado, but the saying fit. He didn’t know where Mateo picked up arcane turns of English phrases, especially given that he was some kind of math genius, but Matt knew he’d know.
“So she’s arbitrarily decided that Colorado is the home of the pack, for reals,” Matt said slowly.
Mateo nodded once.
“And you’re humoring her by taking a vacation?”
Mateo swallowed and clenched his chopsticks in a fist. Matt heard a crack, and Mateo put them down carefully. They both looked down at the four pieces of wood.
“Not a vacation.” Mateo struggled to grip the much shorter halves in his enormous hand to continue eating. “That’s the first thing you have to find. Broadband.”
“Me!” Stupidly, until this moment, Matt hadn’t expected he was going to be involved.
“Just do what you do. Make sure the place is habitable. Jacomo spent $2 million on the house at a time when that was real money. Just make sure it’s got water and a couple of steaks.”
“And broadband,” Matt added, contemplating in what universe $2 million was not real money, even though he knew to the penny the outflow in a typical month just to keep this office running.
“Exactly!” Mateo said and finished his Boba with a slurp.
One of these days, he was going to suck a tapioca ball into his windpipe and die, and Matt wasn’t at all sure whether he would be sorry. Mateo always drastically underestimated the logistics it took to keep his life running smoothly.
Normally, Matt found a certain satisfaction in making things like this happen. He had a network of vendors and spies all over the city to get him ungettable tickets to celebrity dinners and insider information he could pass off as hunches to keep the Amatos’ hands clean, or at least looking clean.
He didn’t know a goddamn soul in Colorado.
“Do you even know where it is? Colorado’s one in the middle, right?”
“It’s the square. And yes, 113 County Road 13.”
“Because there’s nothing ominous about that,” Matt muttered.
“Numbers do not have luck. No one has luck. It doesn’t exist. We’re all just walking bits of complexity playing out probabilities until we inevitably succumb to entropy.”
“I’m going to tell Nonna you’re an atheist.”
“I’m not an atheist. God is an unprovable theorem, and therefore may not be wrong. You’re the atheist.”
“Hey, I believe in something.”
“But that one specific lord and savior?” He looked so smug.
Matt gritted his teeth. The only thing he truly, deeply believed was that he was never going to win an argument against Mateo Amato and didn’t know why he even tried.
“Take the jet,” Mateo said as he spun back toward the bank of monitors crowding the side of the desk.
“Take the jet?” He wanted Matt to go now?
“They do have airports. I checked.”
Matt sat down in the chair across from the desk. He rarely did when he was in this office. He knew Mateo read his standing as a sign of respect, but he was secretly pleased that his head was higher. It was the kind of stupid dominance games that brothers played and he lost—unless the alpha thought he was playing a different game.
“Seriously, Matty,” he said, pulling a nickname from long ago.
Mateo spun away from his screens, looking surprised to see him still in the office, let alone sitting in front of him.
“What does Nonna think is going to happen?” Matt asked. “You run around with a tail for a couple of days and then come back and magically find your mate and pop out babies?”
“The finding has never been the problem.”
“You’re an alpha werewolf with a stupid amount of money. No shit, finding female shifters isn’t the problem.”
“Also known as women.”
“Or does she suspect that the women of Colorado are so hideous you’re going to come back and be dazzled?”
Mateo snickered, but Matt had been completely serious. He wouldn’t put anything past Nonna. Mateo was spoiled for choice, which made every choice seem a little bit dull.
“She thinks the pack is dying because we’re not in a forest somewhere,” Mateo said with a deep sigh.
Matt sat back. “Every pack is dying. Shifters are dying.” It was a dirty secret they never spoke aloud. He knew it better than most. The reason his birth pack was so vulnerable was that there just weren’t enough wolves. Over half the children born never shifted. Whatever magic sustained shifters was bleeding out of the world.
“Yes, but I haven’t evena tried,” Mateo said in Nonna’s accent.
“I know you’d do just about anything in the world for her, and so would I, but you cannot do this for her.”
“I want kids!”
“Just not now. And not with any woman you’ve met in your life.”
“This is why I love you. You say unsayable things.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with them.” In fact, Matt had often benefited from the Mateo Amato Reject Club and sometimes from the Mateo Amato Not Yet Rejected But Gave Up Club. They were often the only women interested, because the Haven’t Met Mateo Amato Yet Club had broken his heart more than once. Many shifters’ fascination with him lasted until the moment they met his boss. He couldn’t really blame them. Much.
He shook that off. “Matty, promise me as your brother that you’re not going to knock somebody up to hand Nonna a grandchild. Promise me.”
For ninety percent of his life, he was happy to play on the sidelines as family fixer and vague employee. The glove fit because it was real. This pack had given him everything he ever needed or wanted, including an apartment in that ritzy building and a salary that made his eyes water the first time he saw his paycheck. It was Mateo who insisted he was family. He didn’t cash that chit often, but he pulled it out now.
“Of course.”
“Say the damn words,” Matt said, well aware of the CEO’s ruthless bargaining ability.
“I promise not to knock up a woman I don’t love with all my heart, all my soul, and all my… All the rest of me. I forget the words.”
“Good, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that was blasphemy.”
“I promised I’d put my paws in the dirt, not make a lifetime commitment.”
“Okay,” Matt said and sat back. He still felt nervous. Nonna had a way of getting what she wanted, even when that seemed like the furthest thing from your plans.
“Send the jet back when you’re ready,” Mateo said, his gaze sliding away from Matt.
Matt got up and shook his head. “I’m coming back on the jet.”
“What?”
“You might be banished to the middle of nowhere as punishment for your commitment phobia.”
“Like you’re any better!”
“Yeah, but I’m not carrying on the family line of the Amato pack. So while you’re putting paws in the dirt, I’ll be here with my feet up drinking Boba.”
“You hate Boba.”
“It’s a slimy job, but somebody has to drink it.”
He swiped the fortune cookie off the table and walked out without another word in another subtle power play that Mateo didn’t even know he was losing.
Part of Matt regretted he wouldn’t be there to see the train wreck. He’d pay good money to watch Mateo Amato put his manicured fingernails into dirt, but this wasn’t his punishment. New York, so far as he was concerned, had everything he needed, and there wasn’t anything to find anywhere else. Especially in not the ass backward end of nowhere in a cursed house with two thirteens in the address.
